Queen of Candesce (25 page)

He shrugged. “Yesterday's council meeting would otherwise have been my last public performance. At least here, as your, uh, guest, I might have the opportunity to act as Sacrus's negotiator. Think about it—you're surrounded, outgunned; you're approaching the point where you have to admit you're going to lose. But I can tell you the semaphore codes to signal our commanders that we've reached an accommodation. As long as you had power here, you could have functioned as the perfect traitor. A few bad orders, your forces ordered into a trap, then it's over the wall for you and me, the key safely into my master's hands, you on your way home to wherever it is you came from.”

Venera tamped down on her anger. Sarto was used to dealing in cold political equations; so was she, for that matter. What he was proposing shouldn't shock her. “But if I'm disgraced, I can't betray my people.”

“Your usefulness plummets,” he said with a nod. “So, no, I didn't tattle on you. You're hardly of any value now, are you? All you've got is the key. If your own side's turned against you, your only remaining option is to throw yourself on the mercy of Sacrus. Which might win me some points if I'm the one who brings you in, but not as much, and—”

“—And I have no reason to expect good treatment from them,” she finished. “So why should I do it?”

He stood up—slowly, mindful of her gun—and walked a little distance away. He gazed up at the room's little windows. “What other option do you have?” he asked.

She thought at first that he'd said this rhetorically, but something about his tone…It had sounded like a genuine question.

Venera sat there for a while, thinking. She went over the incident with the council members on the roof; who could have outted her? Everything depended on that—and on when it had happened. Sarto said nothing, merely waited patiently with his arms crossed, staring idly up at the little window.

Finally she nodded and stood up. “All right,” she said. “Jacoby, I think we can still come to an…accommodation. Here's what I'm thinking…”

As sometimes happened at the worst of moments, Venera lost her sense of gravity just before she hit the ground. The upthrusting spears of brush and stunted trees flipped around and became abstract decorations on a vast wall she was approaching. Her feet dangled over sideways buildings and the pikes of soldiers. Then the wall hit her and she bounced and tumbled like a rag doll. Strangely, it didn't hurt at all—perhaps not so strangely, granted that she was swaddled in armor.

She unscrewed her helmet and looked up into a couple dozen gun barrels. They were all different, like a museum display taken down and offered to her; in her dazed state she almost reached to grab one. But there were hands holding them tightly and grim men behind the hands.

When she and Sarto had reached the rooftop of Liris they found a theatrical jumble of bodies, torn tenting, and brazier fires surrounded by huddling men in outlandish armor. At the center of it all, the thick metal cable rose up and out of sight into the turbulent mists; that cable glowed gold now as distant Candesce awoke.

She had spotted Moss and headed over, keeping her head down in case there were snipers. He looked up, lines of exhaustion apparent around his eyes; glancing past her, he spotted Sarto. “What's this?”

“We need to break this siege. I'm going over the wall, and Sarto is coming with me.”

Moss blinked, but his permanently shocked expression revealed none of his thoughts. “What for?”

“I don't know whether the commanders of our encircling force have been told that I'm an imposter and a traitor. I need to bring Jacoby Sarto in case I need a…ticket, I suppose you could call it…into their good graces.”

He nodded reluctantly. “And how do you p-propose to reach our force? S-Sacrus is between us and them.”

Now she grinned. “Well, you couldn't do this with all of us, but I propose that we
jump.
”

Of course they'd had help from an ancient catapult that Liris had once used to fire mail and parcels over an enemy nation to an ally some three miles away. Venera had seen it on her second day here; with a little effort, it had been refitted to seat two people. But nobody, least of all her, knew whether it would still work. Her only consolation had been the low gravity in Spyre.

Now Venera had two possible scripts she could follow, one if these were soldiers of the council alliance, one if they owed their allegiance to Sacrus. But which were they? The fall had been so disorienting that she couldn't tell where they'd ended up. So she merely put up her hands and smiled, and said, “Hello.”

Beside her Jacoby Sarto groaned and rolled over. Instantly another dozen guns aimed at him. “I think we're not that much of a threat,” Venera said mildly. She received a kick in the back (which she barely felt through the metal) for her humor.

A throb of pain shot through her jaw—and an odd thing happened. Such spasms of pain had plagued her for years, ever since the day she woke up in Rush's military infirmary, her head bandaged like a delicate vase about to be shipped via the postal system. Each stab of pain had come with its own little thought, whose content varied somewhat but always translated roughly to either
I'm all alone
or
I'm going to kill them.
Fear and fury, they stabbed her repeatedly throughout each day. The fierce headaches that often built over the hours just added to her meanness.

But she'd taken the bullet that struck her jaw and blown it back out the very same gun that had shot her. So, when her jaw cramped this time, instead of her usual misery Venera had a flash of memory: the morning gun going off with a tremendous explosion in her hands, bucking and kicking and sending her flying backward into the Lirisians. She had no idea what the feeling accompanying that had been, but she liked it.

So she grinned crookedly and stood up. Dusting herself off, she said with dignity, “I am Amandera Thrace-Guiles, and this is Jacoby Sarto of the Spyre Council. We need to talk to your commanders.”

 

“You have a reputation for being foolhardy,” said the army commander, his gray moustaches waggling. “But that was ridiculous.”

It turned out that they'd nearly overshot both Sacrus and Council Alliance positions. Luckily several hundred pairs of eyes had tracked their progress across the rolled-up sky of Spyre and it was her army that had gotten to Venera and Jacoby first. Sarto didn't seem too upset about the outcome, which was telling. What was even more significant was that everyone was calling her “Lady Thrace-Guiles,” which meant that word of her deceptions hadn't made it out of Liris. Here, Venera was still a respected leader.

She preened at the commander's back-handed compliment. He stood with his back to a brick wall, a swaying lamp nodding shadows across the buttons of his jacket. Aides and colonels bustled about, some shoving little counters across the map board, others reading or writing dispatches.

Venera smelled engine oil and wet cement. The alliance army had set up its headquarters in a preservationist roundhouse about a mile from Liris; these walls were thick enough to stop anything Sacrus had so far fired. For the first time in days, Venera felt a little safe.

“I wouldn't have had to be foolhardy if the situation weren't so dire,” she said. It was tempting to upbraid this man for hesitating to send his forces to relieve Liris; but Venera found herself uninterested anymore in taking such familiar pleasures. She merely said, “Tell me what's been happening out here.”

The commander leaned over the board and began pointing at the little wooden counters. “There've been engagements all across Greater Spyre,” he said. “Sacrus has won most of them.”

“So what are they doing? Conquering countries?”

“In one or two cases, yes. Mostly they've been cutting the preservationist's railway lines. And they've taken or severed all the elevator cables.”

“Severed?” Even to an outsider like her this was a startling development.

One of the aides shrugged. “Easy enough to do. They just use them for target practice. Except for the ones at the edge of the world, like Liris. The winds around those lines deflect the bullets.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Why don't they just use more high-powered guns on them?”

The aide shook his head. “Ancient treaty. Places limits on muzzle velocities. It's to prevent accidental punctures of the world's skin.”

“—Not significant, anyway,” said the commander with an impatient gesture. “The war will be decided here on Greater Spyre. The city will just have to wait it out.”

“No, it can't wait,” she said. “That's what this is all about. Not the city, but the docks.”

“The docks?” The commander stared at her. “That's the last thing we're going to worry about.”

“I know, and Sacrus is counting on that.” She glared at him. “Everything that's happening down here is a diversion from their real target. Everything except…” She nodded at Liris.

Now they were looking at each other with faintly embarrassed unease. “Lady Thrace-Guiles,” said the commander, “war is a very particular art. Perhaps you should leave such details to those who've made it their careers.”

Venera opened her mouth to yell at him, thought better, and took a deep breath instead. “Can we at least be agreed that we need to break Sacrus's hold on Liris?”

“Yes,” he said with a vigorous nod. “We need to ensure the safety of our leadership. For that purpose,” he pointed at the table, “I am advocating a direct assault along the innermost wall.”

A moment of great temptation made Venera hesitate. The commander was proposing to go straight for the walls and leave the group trapped at the world's edge to its fate. He didn't know that his objective was actually there. They'd made themselves her enemies and Venera could just…forget to tell him. Leave Guinevera and the others to Sacrus's mercy now that she had the army.

She couldn't claim not to have known, though, unless the Lirisians went along with it. And she was tired of deceptions. She sighed and said, “Liris is a critical objective, yes, but the rest of our leadership is actually trapped with the Lirisian army at the edge of the world.” There were startled looks up and down the table. “Yes—Master Thinblood, Principe Guinevera, and Pamela Anseratte, among others, are among those pinned down in the hurricane zone. I'm sure you were concerned for the safety of that group, but they're even more important than you probably knew.”

The commander frowned down at the map. On it, Liris was a square encircled by red wooden tokens representing Sacrus's army. This circle squashed a knot of blue tokens against the bottom edge of the map: the Lirisian army, trapped at the edge of the world. Left of the encirclement was a no-man's-land of tough brush that had so far resisted burning. Left of
that
, the preservationist siding and army encampment where they now stood.

“This is a problem,” said the commander. He thought for a moment, then said, “There are certain snakes that coil around their victims and choke them to death.” She raised an eyebrow, but he continued, “One of their characteristics, so I've been told, is that if you try to remove them they tighten their grip. Right now Sacrus has both Liris and our leaders in its coils, and if we try to break through to one they will simply strangle the other.”

To relieve the Lirisian army, they would have to force a wedge under Liris, with the edge of the world at their right side. To do this they would trade off their ability to threaten Sacrus along the inner sides of Liris—freeing those troops up to assault the walls of Liris. Conversely, the best way to relieve Liris would be to come at it from the inner side, which meant swinging the army away from the world's edge—thus giving Sacrus a free hand against the trapped force.

Venera examined the map; it didn't tell her anything she didn't already know. “We have to fool them into making the wrong choice,” she said.

“Yes, but how are we going to do that?” He shook his head. “Even if we did, they can maneuver just as fast as we can. They have less ground to cover than we do to redeploy their forces.”

“As to how we'll fool the snake into uncoiling,” she said, “it helps to have your own snake to consult with.” She turned and waved to some figures standing a few yards away. Jacoby Sarto emerged from the shadows; he was a silhouette against klieg lights that pinioned a pair of hulking locomotives in the center of the roundhouse. He was accompanied by two armed soldiers and a member of Bryce's underground.

The commander bowed to Sarto but then said, “I'm afraid we cannot trust this man. He is of the enemy.”

“Lord Sarto has seen the light,” said Venera. “He has agreed to help us.”

“Pah!” The commander sneered. “Sacrus are masters of deception. How can we trust him?”

“The politics are complex,” she said. “But we have very good reasons to trust him. I do. That is why I brought him.”

There were more glances thrown between the colonels and the aides. The commander twitched a frown for just a moment, then said, “No. I understand the dilemma we're in, but my sovereign and commanding officer is Principe Guinevera, and he's in danger.
Politically,
saving our leadership has to be the priority. I'll not countenance any plan that weakens our chance of doing that.”

Jacoby Sarto laughed. It was an ugly, contemptuous sound, delivered by a man who had spent decades using his voice to whither other men's courage. The commander glared at him. “I fail to see the humor in any of this, Lord Sarto.”

“Forgivable,” said Sarto drily, “as you're not aware of Sacrus's objectives. They want Liris, not your management. They haven't crushed the soldiers pinned down at the world's edge because they're dangling them as bait.”

“What could they possibly want with Liris?”

“Me,” said Venera, “because they surely think I'm still there.—And the elevator cable. They need to cut it. All they have to do is capture me or make it impossible for me to leave Greater Spyre. Then they've won. It will just be a matter of time.”

Now it was the commander's turn to laugh. “I think you vastly overrate your own value and underrate the potential of this army,” he said, sweeping his arm to indicate the paltry hundreds gathered in the cavernous shed. “You alone can't hold this alliance together, Lady Thrace-Guiles. And I said it before, the elevator cables are of little strategic interest.”

Venera was furious. She wanted to tell him that she'd seen more men gathered at circuses in Rush than he had in his vaunted army. But, remembering how she had thrown a lighted lamp at Garth in anger and his gentle chiding after, she bit back on what she wanted to say and instead said, “You'll change your mind once you know the true strategic situation. Sacrus wants—” She stopped as Sarto touched her arm.

He was shaking his head. “This is not the right audience,” he said quietly.

“Um.” In an instant her understanding of the situation flipped around. When she had walked in here she had seen this knot of officers in one corner of the roundhouse and assumed that they were debating their plan of attack. But that wasn't what they were doing at all. They had been
huddling
here, as far as possible from the men they must command. They weren't planning; they were hesitating.

“Hmmm…” She quirked a transparently false smile at the commander. “If you men will excuse me for a few minutes?” He looked puzzled, then annoyed, then amused. Venera took Sarto's arm and led him away from the table.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

She stopped in an area of blank floor stained over the decades by engine oil and grease. At first Venera didn't meet Sarto's eyes. She was looking around at the towering wrought-iron pillars, the tessellated windows in the ceiling, the smoky beams of light that intersected on the black backs of the locomotives. A deep knot of some kind, loosened when she cried in Eilen's arms, was unraveling.